Latest Blog Posts

As I mentioned in my original post, Exploring Excel 2013 as Microsoft’s BI Client, I will be posting tips regularly about using Excel 2013 and later. Much of the content will be a result of my daily interactions with business users and other BI devs. In order to not… Read more

PREAMBLE

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I travel and speak quite a lot. A frequent question I’m asked at these events is “I want to start blogging, but don’t know where to start. What do you recommend?” This is a such a common… Read more

With all the recent changes and updates within the Microsoft PowerBI universe, SSRS core technology gets less and less attention. However a recent experience with one of the SSRS report’s functionality triggered my interest to share it.I always thought that WYSIWYG principle for SSRS report exporting formats only worked…

Yesterday I read an article entitled “Why I Don’t Want to Have Coffee With You”, in which the author writes that he doesn’t have the time or the desire to simply “have coffee”. While I empathize with some of the author’s justifications for his position, I was disappointed… Read more

…………The last seven articles in this series of mistutorials on identifying outlying values in SQL Server database were clunkers, in the sense that the methods had many properties in common that made them inapplicable to the scenarios DBAs typically need them for. Chauvenet’s Criterion, Peirce’s Criterion,… Read more

On 21st of April 2015, SQLPort is preparing a very special event. The reason for this is that on 21st of April 2010, during the last TechDays in Portugal, the creation of the SQLPort – Portuguese SQL Server Community was…

Backups are essential for a successful business model. That statement may or may spark some topics for debate, but at the end of the day if the data professional does not have a form of backup in place for his/her business needs you may, no you will, feel the pain.… Read more

Parameter sniffing is a good thing. But, like a good wine, parameter sniffing can go bad. It always comes down to your statistics. A very accurate set of statistics with very little data skew (some values that… Read more

I made a mistake the other day. I’ll admit it. I was wrong. Now I know all of you are shocked, but it does happen on rare occasions. So what was I wrong about you might ask? One of the dev groups I support has been referring to their instances… Read more

Originally posted on Blog Home for MSSQLDUDE:I’ll start part 1 of the Microsoft System Center series, focused on what a SQL Server DBA should know about System Center, with System Center Operations Manager, or SCOM, with the SQL Server Management Pack. When you have licensed the System Center…

Originally posted on Blog Home for MSSQLDUDE:My original posting on System Center Operations Manager for SQL Server DBAs start in part 1 of the series here. Today, I want to take just a minute to give you some pointers in getting started using the System Center Monitoring Pack…

Someone asked me the question recently about how tSQLt works with TRY..CATCH blocks and the exceptions that we might test for. It works fine, just as it would with other code, but you need to understand that a CATCH still needs to re-throw an exception.

Two weeks ago I attended SQLBits in London. This is probably the biggest SQL Server conference in Europe, and this time there were around 1,700 attendees in a special edition of SQLBits – the Superheroes edition.

Between the various sessions and the exhibition hall, I met a lot of people… Read more